In fact, the film positively overflows with color and life, and movement and characters and slapstick and music, too; around about the fourth or fifth time a character takes a clanging hit to the head, it begins to feel as if Disney has returned from the world of computer animation a bit more manic for wear. Computer animation allows for a certain velocity, and Disney may be wary of a child's short attention span: The Princess and the Frog feels cut especially fast for 2-D, as if it's sprinting to catch up.
The Princess and the Frog is a musical about, you know, a princess -- sort of. Tiana (voiced by Anika Noni Rose) is actually a hard-working young woman in thirties New Orleans who dreams of opening her own restaurant. She's also black -- and the movie, to its eternal credit, does not make a big deal of this. What matters is that she's got that certified Disney pluckiness.
You may have noticed that Tiana is not actually a princess; royalty comes into the picture when Prince Naveen (Bruno Campos) visits New Orleans. Though his family is rich, Naveen himself has been cut off, and he's vaguely looking for a wealthy wife to enable his dashing layabout lifestyle. Tiana's blonde, rich friend Charlotte (voiced by Jennifer Cody, with wonderful character animation supervised by Nik Ranieri) would be more than happy to oblige; in a sly nod to the cult of Disney Princesses -- which this movie has been designed to maintain, but also refurbish -- Charlotte is a crazed parody of princess worship. Even better, though, is the fact that writer-directors John Musker and Ron Clements don't treat her as a hateful, well, cartoon. She wants nothing more than to marry a prince, but this desire has a cracked innocence, and she remains a good friend to Tiana (in live action, she would probably be played by Anna Faris).
Before any marriages of convenience can occur, though, Tiana and Prince Naveen find themselves inconveniently transformed into frogs due to the machinations of the sinister voodoo practitioner Dr. Facilier (Keith David provides the voice, while Bruce Smith supervises the spindly, spooky animation). They must work together to find their way back to New Orleans, with the help of several wacky animal sidekicks, et cetera -- the side characters are fun, but this is the point where the movie starts to feel a touch clamorous. It has several neat twists on both the princess formula and the old Frog Prince story, but far as class-conscious shapeshifting adventures go, Princess and the Frog can't match the underrated Emperor's New Groove for wit or invention.
In old-fashioned Disney tradition, the film's set pieces resemble production numbers more than action sequences. And as a visual feast, it more than works. The animators keep finding new ways to fill the screen with shimmering light or Dr. Facilier's swirling, cackling shadows. The joy of animation is palpable throughout. After the cautiousness of the decision to sideline hand-drawn animation, Princess feels especially bold. It's become standard, for example, for Pixar and DreamWorks to utilize retro, simplified 2-D versions of their characters for end-credits sequences; in a lovely flight of fancy, this film gives the heroine's 'I want' song over to this style.
It helps, too, that Rose has a lovely singing voice, that Prince Naveen is actually quite charming, far moreso than anyone who's ever taken that adjective as a surname, and that there's an alligator who wants desperately to play jazz trumpet (that's just inherently sort of wonderful). Musker and Clements worked on The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and Hercules, and this one fits into that range, if short of Aladdin's dizzying heights or Mermaid's most dazzling songs. They know how to please families with panache; if they're not careful, 'like a Disney movie' might once again cease to be a pejorative phrase.
